Farewell to London....

On our last day we were determined to tick all of the boxes we had missed so it was an early start to see Westminster Abbey prior to the masses arriving.
But not without a great coffee (not always easy to find in London!) and a french pastry to get us going at Monmouth It was just along the street and had a queue - which is always a good sign.

Westminster Abbey was fascinating as much for the celebrities from many ages buried there as the beautiful arched ceilings and stained glass windows. We wandered around with the audio guide and chatted to one of the staff who was very happy to point out the bust of Adam Lindsay Gordon, whom he described as a "dashing young man". I think he's the only Australian who seems to have managed a spot there.
 I did have a slight PTSD response when I saw that Geoffrey Chaucer was buried there too. It brought back many memories of trying to learn Chaucer for the Year 12 English Literature exam....from memory I think I got it completely wrong! And it was a compulsory question!

Then it was off for a quick peruse of the Victoria and Albert Museum - better known as the V&A. We parted company for an hour as I was headed for Fashion and Jewellery and Ewan was set for European History, We did both manage to see some of the Asia exhibitions and some great sculptures too. I can't say we did it justice but we were on a mission!

If you're wondering what this ceramic sculpture is don't ask me as I have no idea either. It's by a British woman called Rachel Kneebone and all of her sculptures were white ceramics like this one. Intriguing!

We headed towards home so we could return to the Borough Market for lunch -felafel for Ewan and pulled pork roll for me  - and we wandered along the Thames to eat it in the sunshine. It seemed as if every Londoner had decided to find a spot in the sun as the banks of the Thames was so busy.

Eventually we made it to the Tate Modern for our second visit, This time we caught the lift to the 10th floor to admire the view. It would be fair to say that whilst London has some beautiful historic old buildings they have also built some monstrosities in the past few decades.

We went to see all of the art that we had missed on the previous visit: some of it stunning, some of it quirky and some of it downright confusing! But that's modern art for you!
Then it was back to the room to get our things in order for an early departure on the Eurostar train headed for the 'chunnel' and France the next day.

This one is made from human hair and bumper bars : the Indian woman who made it was fascinated by the tying of hair onto bumper bars in India to protect the vehicle's  occupants.

But not before we had dinner with Lany (Crofts) who is working as a paramedic for the London Ambulance Service. She had some great stories to tell and we had a lovely time catching up with her. And we had fish and chips for dinner as that seemed an appropriate farewell meal.

Early the next day, in order to miss the peak hour Tube traffic we set off for St Pancras Station. At least to go underground into the Tube station this time we found the escalators and not the stairs. Carrying my bag up four flights of stairs to get to ground level on the way to our accommodation was no fun!
St Pancras Station was absolute mayhem with hundreds of people headed for France for school holidays including 70 young people from Canada dressed in red jackets headed for the Vimy battlefields - but more of them later! We queued for ages only to be told by a very 'efficient' Railways employee that we were too early and to go back to the end of the queue! At this point Ewan refused and we continued to queue until we got to the desk and then we just hovered until we could check-in! For a minute there I wasn't sure what was going to happen, but clearly the pandemonium was so great no one knew what to do about us!

We finally boarded and headed for Calais....and France at last.

your Anglophile correspondent ... or at least for this week!

Dianne